Divers have found 4 bodies in two sleeping compartments of the dive boat that sank on Sunday night. The boat is in 70 metres and sank in a freak storm. 23 people were rescued on Monday, one body was found yesterday and 2 people are still missing.
This from the Phuket Gazette.
SCMP is reporting that biologists in the Philippines have rescued a 38cm whale shark near Donsol, which may be the smallest known specimen of a whale shark found so far. It had been caught by fishermen and tied by its tail to a stick on the beach.
In 1996 an examination of a dead whale shark discovered a number of unborn embryos which measured between 37 and 48 cm. That implies that this new whale shark is a baby and may have been born around Donsol.
Donsol is known for the large number of adult whale sharks which can be found there at certain times of year, and it has always been assumed that it is one of many feeding areas along their migration routes. Now this opens up the interesting possibility that it is more important and forms an area where whale sharks come to give birth.
The whale shark pup was released in deep water.
The photo above comes from an SCMP article.
The Apple Daily is reporting that the two Hong Kong divers who died at the weekend in the Philippines suffered from an air embolism brought on by a rapid ascent. And Ming Pao says that police confirmed that their tanks were still half full.
Divers off eastern Australia are being urged to take along digital cameras, so they can take photos of any sharks they come across. Given the hysteria surrounding the recent attacks in Sydney, I originally assumed that it was a media circus idea, to help them identify the culprit in the event of any more incidents. I suppose even that would be progress, as up until now the media seem to believe there is only one species, i.e. the “man-eating shark”, along with its sub-species, the “killer shark”.
Anyway it turns out the request comes from Sean Barker, a Macquarie University marine researcher, who is trying to compile a computerised photo album recording every grey nurse shark. In 2000 a New South Wales Fisheries survey estimated that there was less than 300 left on Australia’s east coast. Mr. Barker reckons that is pessimistic and thinks it’s more like 1,000.
Apparently each shark has a pattern of dots, highlighted in these 2 pictures, with which they can be uniquely identified. To help with this he needs photos, and has asked people to upload them to http://www.spotashark.com/. So if you are diving in that area and want to help out, you need to photograph the shark side on, from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail. Apparently the left side is preferable.
You can find out more by going to Spot a Shark website (from where these photographs came), and there is an article in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Scientists at the climate change summit in Copenhagen are claiming that earlier estimates of the rise in sea levels caused by global warming, are too conservative. They believe that sea levels could rise by a metre or more by 2100. The original projections apparently did not include the impact of polar ice melting or breaking off.
I presume they are talking about the effects of melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice, as the sea ice in the Arctic is already floating, so presumably cannot have much of an impact on sea levels.
More from the BBC.
Tonight (Wed 11 March) there is a Royal Geographical Society Hong Kong lecture by Julia Whitty. The lecture is Coral Reefs: On the Edge, which will cover what they describe as the most endangered of the biospheres. To quote from their website:
“Julia Whitty shows why this is happening, how it can be reversed, who’s working on it and what it means to us to keep our planet vibrantly alive. Ms Whitty has spent the past 25 years working in the planet’s great wildernesses, from coral reefs and cloud forests, to the African veldt and Indian jungles. Her stories from the front lines are urgent, poignant and funny, revealing the wonders of science and the secret lives of animals in the wild. Her more than 70 nature documentaries have aired on PBS, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, among many other broadcasters worldwide.”
The lecture will be at 2/F Olympic House, So Kong Po, Causeway Bay, with a drinks reception at 6:30pm and the lecture at 7:30pm.
Click here for the Royal Geographical Society Hong Kong website.
More bad news I’m afraid. On Sunday night, dive boat from Dive Asia named Choke Somboon sank 22km from Phuket, while on the way back from the Similans. Fishing boats rescued 23 people, but two Australians, two Swiss, one German, one Japanese and one Thai were reported missing.
There’s more here.
A separate report says that the boat was MV Dive Asia 1, and that it was sunk by a squall that came up without warning. It lists the missing as: Jetzinger Gabrielle, Germany; Yuba Hirotsuga, Japan; Klaus Konradder, Austria; Monika Schuster, Austria; Sibylle Bucher, Switzerland, Rolf Niederberge, Switzerland; Jumpa Sorntat, Thailand.
Meanwhile News 24 are reporting that the body of a woman has been found.
SCMP has an update on the story of the 2 divers who died in Cebu. They were part of a group of 6 people from Hong Kong. They left their resort at 10am on Sunday for Olango Island, and descended to 40 metres. According to a local report, after half an hour they had not surfaced, so another group of divers went to look for them. A few minutes into the search they were found floating unconscious, but were declared dead on arrival at the Mactan Doctors Hospital.
Apparently another male diver also had trouble in the water, and while he suffered injuries, these are not life-threatening. It was not explained whether this other diver’s injuries were related to the incident, whether they happened during the search and recovery for example.
The divers were described by Curly Wong Fan-tai, director of the Hong Kong Underwater Association, as veteran divers who held “technical diving qualification”, although the SCMP didn’t elaborate on what qualifications those were. Apparently at the site there is a chance to see Thresher sharks, but they are quite deep and there are sometimes strong currents.
Julius Bolado of the homicide section of the Lapu Lapu City Police apparently said that the incident appeared to be an accident, and that the instructor, Cheung Hung-kam (also from Hong Kong) had told him that the pair may have run out of air. At first sight, it seems a bit odd that both could run out of air at the same time. However a couple of years ago, due to multiple equipment failures, and a very bad decision to try and repair a second stage at depth, my buddy and I found ourselves in an out of air situation. In the event we were able to buddy breathe our way from 40 metres to the surface on one second stage from a tank that, due to a free flow, was rapidly losing its remaining air. We got to the surface with the tank nearly empty (and the other unusable) having missed several minutes of decompression stops. We immediately put ourselves on oxygen and fortunately we were both unhurt and considerably wiser, but it was touch and go for a while. It just goes to show how quickly things can go horribly wrong, and how steep the incident pit can be. At the moment there is not enough information to know what happened in this case, there are still more questions than answers.
To read the story, if you are a subscriber you can go to SCMP’s website. (Otherwise you’ll have to buy the paper!)
SCMP have picked up a story from the GMA TV News website about 2 Hong Kong citizens who have died in a diving accident in the Philippines. Pang Chi-lung and Joanne Cheung Wai were both staying at Paradive Beach Resort on Mactan in Cebu. They had apparently been staying there since 6th March. It sounds as though they were diving off Olango Island and after 40 minutes they had not yet surfaced. Their instructor went in to look for them, but when he found them they were already unconscious. They were certified dead on arrival at hospital.
Our sympathies go out to their families and friends.
If you are a subscriber, the SCMP article is here.
Scuba STAR Network are conducting one of their regular safety surveys, this time on BCD safety. You can help by going to their website. You can also see results from their recent survey on regulators.
The BBC has an article on the sardine run, which includes a couple of videos. The first one features sardines on the menu for dolphins, sharks and gannets. The second focuses on gannets diving down to 10 metres to get at the fish, but then swimming down a further 10 metres to stop them escaping.
The sardine run apparently forms part of the BBC Natural History Unit series, Nature’s Great Events.
(John Nievaart of Narcoopa Holiday Cottages)
Earlier this week about 200 whales beached themselves on the southern end of King Island in Tasmania. The good news is that rescuers have managed to help get 54 pilot whales and 5 dolphins back into deep water, but these were the only survivors.
Tasmania is on the migration path for many whales coming up from their Antarctic feeding grounds, so seems to suffer more than its fair share of strandings.
You can read more from ABC News, and there is more information here.